The Case of the Great Media Collapse

By Heather Turner


INTRODUCTION:

“You know my methods, Watson. There was not one of them which I did not apply to the inquiry. And it ended by my discovering traces, but very different ones from those which I had expected."
     The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893)


Walking out and about in any city I’ve ever visited is overwhelming and surprising ... not necessarily because of the strange people or the amazing architecture. Rather, being in a city is a rare opportunity for a rural person to be immersed in advertisements and mainstream traditional media. Ads are telling: where ads are placed and the audiences they target. These two things can tell you where you are. San Francisco, known for its political liberalness, is covered in ads which play into the hippie stereotype. Sprint Cellular ads tout, “Peace, Love and Coverage,” while its competitor Helio appeals to a “Mobile Utopia." In Las Vegas, nude pictures with cleverly placed stars and a phone number taunt tourists from a fleet of vans serving as billboards. Commuting in London’s underground tube system is where I spotted the first plastic surgery ad I had ever seen. But, what happens when the ads go away?

That is exactly what happened in early 2009. It has since been referred to as “the Great Media Collapse.” The Great Media Collapse was as severe as the name suggests and its repercussions are still felt today in the traditional media and PR industry. Major magazines and newspapers still struggle to recover ad revenue, while advertisers explore social networking and applications to communicate with target audiences.

In the short term, the real world implications for target audiences was the literal disappearance of ads for more than a month in early 2009. I had first noticed this in London around New Years Eve. The most notable difference was the appearance of the city’s underground system. The tube, normally covered in all manner of ads, was almost completely devoid of the stuff. Many display cases for ads remained empty or were filled with government sponsored public service messages. Upon flying back to America’s Heartland and picking up the latest Sunday editions of the Kansas City Star and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I found that each was about half the size they normally would have been. I realized then, that something big was going on in the advertising industry. Something that was big enough to affect the industry on a global scale.

I. TRADITIONAL MEDIA

While the media collapse did appear to happen overnight, it wasn’t really the case. The troubles in the traditional media had started long before the ads disappeared. The business model of major newspapers and magazines had been unravelling for years, even before online advertising became prominent. For starters, newspapers had suffered for decades from the “Wal-Mart phenomenon.” Poynter Institute researchers explained, “The retail juggernaut rarely runs newspaper advertising, and other big-box retailers like Home Depot and Circuit City have shifted from display advertising to inserts” (State of the News Media Report, 2006). By putting competing retail chain stores out of business, Wal-Mart effectively siphoned off a great deal of revenue from publishers.

On top of the pressures from declining retail ads, consumer’s reading habits were changing. A cultural shift was afoot as the booming US population shifted from urban to suburban housing, complicating the home delivery of afternoon papers. Long working days, along with the breakdown of the nuclear family had also contributed to declines in evening circulation. With the exception of retirees, all demographics were simply reading newspapers less. The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism noted: “In 1950, 123 percent of households bought a newspaper (in other words there were 1.23 papers sold per household). By 1990, only 67 percent of households bought a newspaper. By 2000, it was 53 percent” (State of the News Media Report, 2004). Another blow to revenue came as a result of the 2001 recession, in which total advertising dropped by 9% (ibid).

These long term pressures coupled with the rise of the Internet had left the publishing industries decidedly more anemic looking by 2004. Amidst these trends, Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, captured the mood in the publishing industries, “At places where editors and publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one another, ‘How are you?,’ in that sober tone one employs with friends who have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce” (Alterman, 2008). Magazines were suffering, too. Between March of 2008 and 2009, Advertising Age found that more than 30 magazines, including Playgirl, had ceased publication (Ives, 2009).

While many papers still garnered strong profits in the mid-2000’s, the overall industry remained sluggish and was marked by sporadic revenue growth (State of the News Media Report, 2004).
For example, Gannett, the largest publishing chain in the US, was doing quite well. Its daily USA Today boasted a circulation of nearly 2.3 million along with a total readership of 4.3 million in print (Gannett Press Release, 2007). However, it too struggled with revenue losses due to major advertisers spending less (Gannett Press Release, 2007). The auto, pharmaceutical, and entertainment industries were all pulling back on their advertising budgets. Despite some bright spots here and there, after 2005, advertising expenditures industry wide became increasingly negative. In 2006, print advertising was down by 1.7%. By 2008, expenditures were down 17.7% from the previous year. By 2009, there was collapse: advertising expenditures had fallen by a whopping 28.6%, the most drastic decline the industry had ever experienced (Newspaper Association of America, 2011).

What all these numbers don’t tell you is what was going on behind the scenes in newsrooms, which universally faced cuts leading up to the Great Media Collapse. The fundamental changes to journalism that were occurring were not “just a flesh wound.” Rather, journalism as we know it was in crisis. For nearly twenty years, newsrooms had been shedding reporters. However, this trend accelerated in the 2000s. By the end of 2009, newspaper staff was down to the bare bones, having shed a quarter of its workforce over the course of the decade (State of the News Media Report, 2009). With roughly 14,000 less journalists working in print, inevitably, the quality of news was affected. The PEJ had noted that of 259 newspapers the organization surveyed in early 2008, “59 percent reported reductions in staff, but even more, 61 percent, said that less space was being devoted to news (State of the News Media Report, 2009).” From the largest publishers in the nation, including Gannett, McClatchy, New York Times, and Tribune Company, to Metro papers, such as the Oregonian, The Boston Sun and the Dallas Morning News, newsroom cuts were outright Draconian. The vast majority of daily papers saw their newsrooms cut by half.

WWII Propaganda wars: the British Ministry of Information

by Heather Turner


    As the Western world's greatest states fought for military dominance during the Second World War, a great ideological battle also waged. The outbreak of the war in September 1939 suddenly pitted the morale of the British Ministry of Information against the German Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (Larson, 412). This psychological battle was waged using a variety of methods and mediums that had been honed or created since the end of WWI. The British at first found themselves at a disadvantage, as the British propaganda effort had largely subsided by the end of WWI (Larson, 412.) The Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, however, had been operating since 1933, and was vastly sophisticated (Larson, 412).  The war period coincided with an absolute proliferation of propaganda on both sides of the conflict. Government control of information and the production of propaganda had become as essential to the war effort as munitions. The British Ministry of Information initially had a clunky beginning, and it took refining its methods and structure in the early years of its existence before the MOI's efforts were considered by the press and historians as being truly successful.

     In anticipation of the coming war, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain publicly announced the creation of the Foreign Publicity Department of the Foreign Office in June 1939. By September 1939, the "skeleton ministry" established by the new office was off to a shaky start under the leadership of Lord Hugh MacMillan (Larson, 416, 419). Nonetheless, the war of words, or rather, the war of narratives had begun.

    For the second time in the early 20th century, whole peoples found themselves involved in a massive war effort. Everyone sacrificed for this purpose. In Britain, commodities were carefully rationed and even some varieties of unrationed food had become scarce (Creaton, 85). In addition, London was heavily targeted in air raids, forcing much of the population to take refuge in the cramped conditions in city's underground stations. A wave of criminal activity and domestic terrorism bombings ensued, accompanied by other great tragedies in the capital city. Freak accidents such as the Bethnal Green Tube Station incident in 1943, contributed to the gloom. (Creaton, 3-4). Throughout the conflict, there were waves of evacuations (Creaton, 3-4) and London fell into disrepair. In a manual intended as an advice pamphlet for American servicemen serving in England during the war, The United States War Department offered a vivid snapshot of conditions in the capital city in 1942:

The British people are anxious to have you know that you are not seeing their country at its best ... The houses haven't been painted because factories are not making paint - they're making planes. The famous English gardens and parks are either unkept because there are no men to take care of them, or they are being used to grow needed vegetables. British taxicabs look antique because Britain makes tanks for herself and Russia and hasn't time to make new cars ... There are no luxury dining cars on trains because total war effort has no place for such frills. The trains are unwashed and grimy because men and women are needed for more important work than car-washing.    

    It was of the utmost importance that the citizenry continued to contribute to the total war effort, despite the extreme conditions. In order to convince its citizens to continue making sacrifices, the MOI set forth to influence their thoughts and actions through its now well known use of propaganda, as well as through information censorship. The MOI started out as an impressive operation, with a massive budget and staff. 127 staffers worked in regional offices across the country and 872 operated from its skyscraper headquarters located in the Senate Building of the University of London (Larson, 422).

     One of the first and most difficult tasks the MOI faced was successfully controlling the flow of information to the citizenry. For this purpose, the Ministry had several divisions devoted to handling intelligence, censorship, publicity and press relations (Larson, 417-418). However, MOI had to deal with press requests from an unprecedented number of journalists who were concentrated in London, the "focal point for European news dissemination" (Larson, 419). According to Cedric Larson, a former member of the US War Department's morale division, as many as 10,000 newspapermen covered the war from the capital along with about 1,200 foreign correspondents (419). In its early years of post WWI re-existence, the Ministry's efforts in this regard was heavily criticized, Lord Macmillan being the first of several Minister's of Information to be slated by the press (Larson, 419).

     The press was frustrated and unimpressed with the MOI's inability to function smoothly. At the start of the war, the MOI was initially divided into more than a dozen regional offices, each with separate service departments that controlled censorship autonomously (Pelling, 186). This resulted in uncoordinated censorship which was never quite resolved throughout the first several years of the Ministry's existence. Journalist's early complaints led to a more than year-long restructuring of the MOI, prompted by the confusion caused by the censorship of the landing of British troops in France in September 1939 (Pelling, 186). At first, the press was banned from publishing the troop movements, but the order from the MOI was rescinded hours before the daily papers were to be sent out at 3 a.m. Out of confusion, several papers, including the Daily Express, published the information (Pelling, 186). By 3 a.m., the War Office had again banned the information from being published a second time. The mix up meant that government officials had to seize thousands of newspapers just as they were being distributed throughout London (Larson, 421). The Ministry responded to the backlash by appointing additional censors that could offer 24 hour assistance on story filing (Larson, 421-22). Time had this to say of the Ministry's early efforts: